Discussion: 12 ideas on improving O's popularity in the US

Thanks for the summary, Randy. What is an SEO?

My, where do I start?

Well I agree with probably 8 or 9 of these (and maybe even more) as well as the comment that these points will likely be ignored.

I have long argued some of Randy's points and my club has adopted some of them. I still think there is room (and perhaps even a need) for race format variety but there is a real need for marketing improvements (ie the quicker we don't think like IOF or a Scandi O club the better).

The race formats I think have the most potential for growth are mass start 2-3+ hour races (like Randy stated) and urban races. My club organizes a lot of the 2+ hour races but with the right marketing urban racing perhap with wave starts (like Randy mentions) can have real appeal. In a way this is where the 'non club'/companies have focussed their efforts.

But unlike what Randy has suggested I do believe there is room (and a need) for a weekend of something closer to more traditional racing (ie the two day A meet). I like the idea of a 'Two Stage weekend Race'). Middle distance interval start on Saturday and chase start or mass start long on Sunday. Except market it as a Time Trial and Pursuit or 'Cross' race.

The sport will be 50 years old in North America next year. My club formed in late 1966. Are we going to try the same thing over and over and hope it works next year?

I agree with the gist of several of the points as far as those ideas apply to getting more adults to go participate in some orienteering races. You could get some quick (over a few years) improvements in participation this way. However, I think it's far more important to get kids orienteering. The wait for the return is longer, but the potential to get people who are 'hooked' is higher (though a lot of orienteers seem to think that getting 1 kid hooked out of 100 is a poor outcome... it's not). I guess we should do a bit of both. :-)

I can't even go there with most of the original points but I very much like Hammer's weekend of O' comments. As a budget strapped young person I actually like to explore the place I've paid a lot to visit in the time between Orienteering, rather than fly all the way there and back for one long race (which I would hate anyway, and therefore just not go to).

Lots of points there. I think it's better to mention the ones I agree with and go from there.

Bshields, SEO is search engine optimization and Randy is absolutely right. Everything gets searched for on google currently and businesses pay big money to have their organization come up earlier in search engine results. This can get very complicated but it can also be as simple as having a few keywords associated with your target audience appear somewhere on the homepage. For potential orienteers these words could be something like: maps, compass, adventure, mountains, woods, endurance, challenge. Whatever you want to relate orienteering with and when anyone tired of pick-up basketball games wants an outdoor endurance challenge, an orienteering page could pop up.

And the social aspect. Sooooo important. I can tell you that growing up in this sport in the States it was tough as a teenager and young adult to find motivation for events only from the races. And I'm someone who enjoys the sport. For my friends frok college to try it you would need the mass start, the post-race food scene, the currently popular craft beer, maybe even paired with a live open-air concert the day after. The whole event would need to be set up in a way that people could take pictures to post on Facebook and instagram.

Would this stuff be taking a bit of the soul of orienteering as we know and love it? Absolutely. But to grow the sport it'd be necessary.

I know that I want to continue in orienteering because in Spain I have A LOT of friends who go to events. There's a social scene. We go to events to race hard and hang out with our friends. I don't think I'd feel the same orienteering stateside.

When was this written? What are your successes and failures trying to implement any of this in DVOA? Some of us get it.. but the implementation is not easy.

erikreddy@gmail.com

Maybe we just need a good scandal, theory being there is no such thing as bad publicity. Who knew there was a world pokemon championships?
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/pokemon-gun-arrests-a...

Most of these points make sense if your goal is to attract people from trail running or other sports. However, I am not sure it is the best strategy (after all, these people already like their sports, why would they switch to something else?) and I _am_ sure it should not be the only strategy. There are lots of people who don't do any sports. There are millions of "nerdy" kids who find team sports too intimidating and other individual sports too boring. Their parents struggle to keep them physically active, and orienteering may be just the perfect fit for such kids. There are also many adults who feel the same way. However, very little is done to market orienteering to this audience. So here are a few points from a fairly asocial person who started to orienteer just over a year ago, never participated in any sports prior to that, but liked orienteering enough to spend much of his vacation at the Maritime O-fest/COC that just ended yesterday:

1. Mass starts are intimidating for novices in any sport, but they are particularly intimidating in orienteering. Spending several minutes just trying to orient the map and figuring out where you are while everybody around you is racing - what can be worse for a shy kid (or even an adult)?

2. Long distances are hard for unfit people new to sports and take forever for the inexperienced. I did the M35 Long at the COC (which was 8k) in just under 3 hours and was tired as hell - how long would it take me to do 20k?

3. Finding your way when lost is a huge part of the appeal of orienteering. Please don't ruin that fun by allowing GPS navigation. Being lost is frustrating and it would be hard to resist using the GPS if it is allowed, and then I'll hate myself for that moment of weakness. (Of course, screenless GPS loggers that can be used to analyze your race afterwards should be allowed, as they are now.)

4. I agree with dropping the "world's smartest athlete" thing - it's very subjective and indeed depends on whether things like chess are included. However, orienteering _is_ one of the few sports that have the potential to appeal to nerdy, shy, but smart kids, and not using that aspect in promoting orienteering would be stupid in my view.

5. If I travel somewhere, I want to have as many races in as many diverse terrains as possible. The Maritime O-fest was 7 races in 6 different terrains, which was great. I did OK in some of the races given my level of experience and fitness but screwed up in others. If I just ran one race and did poorly in it, I would have been disappointed about the whole trip.

6. One of the distinctive features of orienteering is its diversity - different terrains, different fitness and experience levels, different age groups, different race formats. I think it should be kept this way, this diversity should be embraced and orienteering should be promoted to different groups of people - not just to trail racers.

By the time I got to number 6 (longer distances) you lost me. You are describing a different sport.

Sounds like the Billygoat.

If Randy is describing a different sport, that sounds great to me (IMHO.) The current one is in its dotage.

I like a lot of Randy's suggestions. I think a lot of those suggestions can play well with "traditional" orienteering - for example, you can have both a beginner course with traditional interval starts and short distances at an event where the main race is an ultra mass start.

You may be describing a different sport, and it sounds a helluva lot more fun than the current version of clique-y clubs hanging out in a parking lot at some remote forest. If we want to grow the competitive junior side of things (and I hope we want that), the current model is not an attractive sell.

Re MChub #1, that could be mitigated with a couple minutes with the map before the race start and/or streamered/longer/obvious lead out to cp #1.

local orienteering events could be used as training for this other mass start navigation race

Lots of good ideas here. We adopted similar out-of-the-box thinking for adventure racing, maintained the key AR elements, implemented new ideas that purists scoffed at (e.g., moving races to popular and/or urban venues and adding Amazing Race type challenges), marketed the races via Facebook ads and widespread media releases, and now average 400-500 racers at our 5-hour events, including 100-250 first-time racers. We've been able to get about 10% of them to step up to our 8-10 hour traditional/wilderness races which average 150. Instead of scoffing at new ideas, I've been fortunate to scoff at my old job and put on races full time. Not sure how much of what we've done applies to orienteering, but happy to help. Feel free to ask me questions here, email me at mark@miadventureracing.com or read about our strategies at http://miadventurerace.com/learn-more/strategies-t...

How come some of the O clubs near big cities with massive minority populations, have such small memberships?

I agree with about 2/3 of randy's points. Particularly, making the language accessible, better marketing and web presence, and better social experience. I'm not convinced, however, that insisting this be an ultra-endurance, mass-start sport is a significant issue. As MChub pointed out, orienteering is a "nerdy" sport. Why do we keep thinking that our market is the same as a bunch of other sports? It's not. Our market is people who enjoy a combination of physical activity and problem solving. While there is some overlap, it's not the same as people who want to look BADASS on Facebook.

Mass-starts help a lot with the social aspect, and we could certainly have plenty more mass start events, but interval starts have a place as well. It's not impossible to make an interval start event enjoyable and social. At local events, a lot of people appreciate that they don't have to be there at a specific time and can start when they choose to arrive within the start window.

The essence of orienteering is map reading. We need to raise awareness among people who enjoy map reading that our events exist (this is the biggest problem - sheer ignorance within our potential market). And then to make sure that they have a good time once they get there. Because these map reading people will have varying interests in both terrain type (urban vs. park vs. forest) and physical exertion, a diverse offering of event types is likely to work best.

A piece of randy's paper is about the A-meet experience. The overwhelming majority of orienteers never go to an A-meet. Their experience is with local events, which are one-day shindigs, usually without much social component. So improving social experience is very important. Perhaps it's because I live where distances are more extreme that changing A-meets seems irrelevant to me. If I'm traveling 1 to 2 hours to an event, I want it to be relatively short so I can be done, maybe enjoy lunch with my friends, go home, and have more day to enjoy. If I'm driving 8 or 9 hours or flying, then I want a festival atmosphere where I'm going to meet people from other places and enjoy a few races - not just one. I can see there's a middle ground - where you might drive about 3 or 4 hours for a single high-class event without spending the night. We don't currently offer this experience much.

I don't think orienteering (by any name) will ever achieve extreme popularity in the US. It's not in tune enough with mainstream US culture. But I do think there is an untapped market we can still reach with improved marketing and a much more social culture that utilizes social media. I'm not convinced that market is made up exclusively (or even primarily) of people who want to run 20K+ .

Good points smittyo. I for one have the most enjoyment at events that are "middle" distance and shorter.

One observation on interval starts: One of the forms of mountain bike racing rapidly growing in popularity is Enduro and they are interval started.

Most of this I agree with, but some I don't. 6 and 7 in particular.

One of the things I like most about this sport is the accessibility. There are levels and distances suitable for pretty much everybody, from small children and families to weekend warriors to retirees to elite athletes.

Make every race 20K+ and you'll majorly limit your audience. You're left with those people who are uber fit and have the time and inclination to train always like they are getting ready for a half-marathon (only more intense since it's in terrain). That eliminates a large chunk of your current participants. I know I'd be done.

Now, I could get behind adding more long mass-start races. Maybe offer 5K, 10K, and 20K versions to replace advanced courses at some events. You'd still need something for beginner and intermediate types until they build their navigation skills.

I prefer the multiple day events (actually I think 3 days is just about right) with regard to travel time and costs. If it takes me 12 hours to drive there, I'm sure as hell not running a 2 hour race and turning around and driving 12 hours home. It's going to cost me the same amount in gas or airfare to get there and back whether I stay for 1 hour or multiple days. So you have hotel/campsite costs (share with friends and you're looking at as little as $20-30/day) and food (which doesn't even really count, as you'd be eating at home anyway, but might be somewhat more expensive if you decide to dine out every meal). I've also gone out and seen really cool local attractions at many A-meets, or just enjoyed the different towns. Not everyone holes up in a motel all day. I do agree with 8 - choosing a location with some other things to do is important and not using some map in the middle of nowhere.

At the last A meet I attended a few years ago, I finished my Saturday race and then had 26 hours until my Sunday race. It was a long wait. Imagine a ski weekend where you take a few runs on Saturday, then hang out in the lodge for 26 hours before a few more runs on Sunday. Or a golf outing where you play 6 holes on Saturday and 9 the next day. Maybe if you're lucky they'll let you play a two-hole "sprint" on Saturday afternoon for an extra $30.

It seems to me that most of Randy’s ideas are pretty dated. Many have been implemented to some degree through the years. Some of these implementations have been successful and some have been less so.

His admonition about eliminating interval starts, however, is wrong headed in many ways. Mass starts are fun, especially for the people at the front of the pack. But a mass start favors running ability over navigation ability. If we are trying to teach our young people to navigate like the Europeans, eliminating events with interval starts will not be helpful. For those who prefer a mass start, there are several road and trail races every weekend around here and you need not bother with having to figure out where to go.

It has been my experience that mass start navigation events are not necessarily more attractive to the athletic public then interval starts. In the Bay Area for a few years we have have two experienced organizations specializing in navigation events with mass starts. BAOC also has a few mass start events each year. I have enjoyed participating in these races, but these events usually draw fewer participants than the interval start events. So from this recent data, It doesn’t seem that the mass start is a panacea for building the sport.

I know this is a thought experiment for most people, but I suspect if you wanted best results, or at least to be able to evaluate the proposal, that the recipe would need to be attempted in its entirety. I think everyone "gets" that, but it goes without saying.

I mean I like clam juice and I don't like parsley, but picking and choosing what you like or think doesn't work is not going to get you an étouffée at the end of the day.

Luckily, in a highly competitive restaurant businesses, ventures like that get sorted out quickly. For better or worse, orienteering, with imperfectly priced inputs and odd elasticities, can stumble along far longer.

While I can appreciate the frustration of Randy and many others at the lack of growth in our sport I can't see any magic bullets that are going to make any significant change in the perception of the general public. Orienteering is fairly well recognized in Rochester after many articles and weekly results appearing in the media for many years.. Our schedule offers options for bikers, kayakers, trail runners, endurance athletes and others with mass and interval starts. We advertise on many forms of social media, try to engage newcomers at every meet and provide good food and drink. We work hard to produce 20-24 quality events each year. As a result our club membership has remained steady and we have a core group of people very dedicated to keep the club going. The common thread for most of our "lifers" is the chance to get out in the woods and to use their minds and bodies to solve the problems presented by the course setters.

I think that OUSA is most helpful in promoting orienteering through existing organizations that have large constituencies and mailing lists. The program in Kentucky is a good example. Through a state grant with help from OCIN permanent courses are being established in many of the state parks. The state then includes orienteering as an activity option for visitors in the brochures and social media. A program like this in all 50 states would go a long way to increasing the recognition of our sport.

The "thinking" element of orienteering is what makes our sport unique. "Cunning running" or the "thinking sport" are a fine descriptions. We just need to find more ways to let people know about it.

It goes without saying that I respect Randy's analysis, T/D's perspective, and those of other the several other iconoclasts (although I don't agree with every plank). I do wonder, however, what they hope to gain by submitting it for discussion on an orienteering forum. It seems akin to a flat tax proponent posting his manifesto on an IRS listserv, with predictable results.

Add to this mix - generational differences.

I had the great pleasure of graduating my youngest of 4 from High School this year, and parents of the next set of kids are yet again "not the same". When my oldest was first in school, my wife and I were the very young parents. We looked around the room on parent night and saw a good portion of other parents graying (they must have looked at us as kids;-).

For pretty much all their school days, we volunteered for school activities and such. (you know - cub scouts is a parent run organization, and the first thing you have to do on the first night back is get a few of the parents from the youngest kids to agree to be leaders;-)

No volunteers, no events.

But as outgoing parents of the youngest - we saw most organizations at every age group struggle to find parent volunteer replacements. It's as if the parents of the younger kids didn't know that they had to be the ones making the organization run.

As graduating parents we could just wish them well and hope they "got it" before the organization was really damaged.

And I'm confident they have their own activities that interest them, I'm confident they'll re-invent things like the block party...

I guess I'm meaning to say - everybody's different, and that difference is grown within different generational environments. Even if we got it right for today's 20-30 year olds, it'll be different soon enough.

A/B testing is good... Stopping improvement efforts is probably a worse flaw.

Unambitious. Why would you want to attract people from 4+hours away? Say you have a 1000 people turn up, yay success. Instead, within that 4h radius, you could 7 or 8 events with 3-400 people, none of whom drive under an hour.

I might write more later, but sheesh.

If you had "volunteers" to do those 7 or 8 events, with high quality, sure. I'm not sure that is the case.

Do you have volunteers to do big events three times a month? And have training in between? It's long term. Knowing Westchester County, I could imagine three or four local clubs, Peekskill-Ossining; Tarrytown-White Plains; Bedford-Katonah... each with local training mid-week, and (shared) local events three times per month. And mass-start, Highlander/Billygoat style events maybe three times a year.

First, make it easier - way too tough for your normal person. Make a big deal out of the "Sport" class which is basically course 2 or 3 difficulty but with distance suitable for a fit weekend warrior.

Next, change the rules so you don't 'get dq'ed for missing controls. Change it to: "who ever gets the most controls in the specified order (within the time limit) is the winner. In case of a tie, the fastest time prevails". Basically the same as what we have now, except the penalty for missing a control is utter failure.

Next, allow teams. Most people want to come with a friend - helps them get over the intimidation of trying a new (and bizarre and potentially un-cool) sport.

Some simpler ideas ;-) Easy to implement and no need to change the hard-core way that we do things. I noticed the O-Ringen this year had many of these ideas

What I often hear from our younger members is that while orienteering is a very interesting activity for a few weekends a year, there is not enough of it and not enough competition to warrant calling it their primary sport.

AZ - thats a really good idea: "you don't 'get dq'ed for missing controls".
So its like getting "short-coursed" in Adventure racing or like a mini-Billygoat at every meet. I like it.

Who cares about finding controls anyway :-)

I think at the local level, removing the DQ and reframing it as AZ put it is a really, really, awesome idea.

If you want to draw some trail runners to the sport, try calling one an "open course trail race". Say 10k mass start with a half dozen spots on trails you must visit. Everyone gets an easy to understand map, not necessarily to IOF standards, with a clear possible route indicated. This could even be signed on the ground. Runners, however, would have the option of presumably faster shortcuts thru the woods. Controls could have punching or just someone copying numbers. A little less nav oriented and shorter than the BG.

That exists already, but usually only eight year olds do it.

Some of these are good ideas, but I think the real problem with orienteering is that most people are not aware it exists. Only a small percentage of the population is going to think that running and navigating at the same time is an activity that they want to do regularly. Tweeking the details of the activity isn't going to change that appreciably. There are people out there who would love orienteering the way it is now, but they don't know about it or don't live in an area where it's available. Sure, offer a variety of experiences, but expand your audience if you want to grow.

I'm a bit late, but would like to comment on the "different sport" anyway: Sprint is a different sport as well, but it is adopted widely (and pushed by IOF, for much the same reasons).

@Eoin, that's how every school session I ever did was done - no DQs for missing or wrong controls, and almost always the chance to go back out and correct the errors. Longer time - but move up the result list by having one fewer error. We've brought that method into our club's local events too.

Just read this on the website of Swedish O Federation (article is Google translated but should work fine).

A very good idea in its simplicity: "Bring a friend"!

Simple maths show that we could double the O population and we would also take care of the "mentor problem" helping newcomers to understand the intricacies of orienteering...

Are Facebook ads commonly used to promote orienteering meets? We are using them for our sprint adventure races in Michigan and finding them very effective. Our current ad has reached 25,000 in our geo area in less than a month, resulting in 650 clicks to our website at a cost of $130, or $0.20 per click. You set the budget, easy to set up, people tag their friends. Use a photo that shows people up close and emotive. Select interests to narrow your audience (e.g., trail running, adventure racing, geocaching, orienteering, etc.). You can also add a pixel to your "thank you for registering" page on your site to determine conversions from ad to purchase and calculate return on investment. We just started doing that.

I've tried that, and it seems potentially cost effective. A problem (not insurmountable I realize, but I haven't surmounted it yet) is that they don't allow any graphics with more than a certain (fairly low) percentage of text. (That is, only a small percentage of the area of the graphic, say 10%, can contain text.) Our club logo contains much more text than is allowed, and it shows up in any posting that we do, so the promotion effort gets rejected by Facebook. Not rocket science to avoid this, I realize.

Do you have photos from past events? I would highly recommend a photo of a participant, even just someone smiling at the camera. Research has shown that the human face is by far the most attention grabbing image for advertising (you mention that your logo shows up in any post you do - I'm not understanding this). Here are the basics on Facebook ads: https://www.facebook.com/business/products/ads

We never used a logo.

For our FB advertising experiment, We spent $15 per meet promoting the club facebook page, using either a flag backlit on a hill by a sunset or me crossing a swamp via a log. With the seven weeks @ 15$ we roughly doubled from 400 to 800 followers

We also spent $15 per meet for meet FB event page. This did not show as dramatically, but I let em rip anyway because it only takes 1.5 starts to pay back (using lazy math).

I will shortly be recommending we resume them for the fall, in part since we have no other viable promotion strategies. There are no adventure racers to show up anymore, and there is no one willing to man a booth at trail races expos.

I tried this for the first time. We had an event, our Big Basin meet, as an existing post. I set the budget at $20. The campaign ran for 3 days, was seen by over 2000 people, got 42 "actions", including 25 likes and 4 comments. The meet is tomorrow, so we'll see what effect it had. We are still seeing results a week after the campaign, as page likes are way up. It helps to make additional comments after the end of the campaign, as it reminds the people who interacted the first time.

How to improve "O" popularity in the US?
Read about Why Golf is Better than Orienteering - an article I wrote a few years ago.

The New England Orienteering Club used to send out press releases for every event to local media outlets (such as a newspaper's calendar page). This yielded a small but constant trickle of newcomers. (The club also had lots of small maps near where people lived.) The club became the largest in North America for a long time.

Here in Colorado, I tried sending out a notice of an event to local papers, radio stations and the chamber of commerce list of events. I received some response from this.

Such efforts yield slow gains over a long time, but needn't be onerous, and unlike some tasks in orienteering, do not require massive expertise.

At the Big Basin meet I mentioned above, we had a huge turnout. Big Basin is at the southern end of the Bay Area, and is at least an hour's drive for most people. We had 40 entries each in the White and Yellow courses, many of which were families or couples. The turnout was much larger than last year, which was the first year in a decade that we'd been able to use the park. It's hard to know how much of that is due to the Facebook paid ad. We're trying it again with a larger ad campaign for our Lake Tahoe A meet in three weeks.

It's interesting that Adrian mentions that golf not being concerned with time as an advantage over orienteering, which in some ways contrasts with the recent OUSA emphasis on showing orienteers running. I recall reading that orienteering was introduced to Japan as a leisurely day hike for families, starting and ending at train stations, and typically including a picnic lunch out on the course. It attracted, if I recall correctly, a large fraction of a million participants over a year or two. When competitive orienteering was introduced, races "only" attracted a few hundred. Maybe long leisurely hikes, with a picnic in the middle, are a way to attract more people. Even with the ultra-fit, I wonder if events that are more about completion than time (like many adventure races, frankly, for the majority of their participants) would be more attractive.

Maybe long leisurely hikes, with a picnic in the middle, are a way to attract more people.

Sounds like rogaining.

Sweet Jeff! So awesome you guys can orienteer at Big Basin again. Can you believe that I was in the Bay Area for the exact 8-year period we were shut out??? Maybe I was just bad luck. If you find that the FB ads really work, that can give you some great opportunities, I'll bet. I have to say, I was wondering why I kept seeing so much activity on the site this last month! It always seems so hard to rally a full crew to staff social events, awards, and refreshments on a regular basis, and that's probably how it will be in the future too. But maybe it's something feasible to do for a handful of "big" events that include targeted advertising.